The Elusive Search for Harmful Snowden Leaks

The Elusive Search for Harmful Snowden Leaks

Edward Snowden (2013 via Wikimedia Commons)

Though much of the establishment press has been lashing out against whistleblower Edward Snowden since his disclosures began last June, until recently a seemingly cogent, moderate condemnation of the NSA leaker’s behavior (as opposed to his person) was hard to find. This month Fred Kaplan, the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, offered such a take in a Slate article that ostensibly shows Snowden to have done great harm to the United States.

Kaplan’s piece first shores up his own freedom of information bona fides, letting the reader know that he worships at the altar of the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and believes debate about NSA reform is valuable. Kaplan then parrots the line that Snowden’s information about the NSA’s activities abroad gave usable information about American intelligence to America’s enemies, but with a host of stories that seemed to back that claim up. He provides the following paragraph, a list of links that you have to avoid clicking on in order to buy his argument.

The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

If you actually read the stories to which he links, you’ll find that Kaplan’s interpretations of Snowden’s dangerous information drops have a pretty serious pro-government slant that shifts the emphasis of nearly every article he names.

The first article he links to, for example, focuses on the NSA’s involvement in targeted killings in Pakistan. And according to the original piece, “former CIA officials said the files [released by Snowden] are an accurate reflection of the NSA’s contribution to finding targets in a campaign that has killed more than 3,000 people, including thousands of alleged militants and hundreds of civilians . . . according to independent surveys.”

Here’s another Kaplan interpretation: Snowden released documents about “an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan.” The article in question, published in the Washington Post, documents “a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.” And the reporters on that piece decided to withhold some “information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods.”

Another: a document “about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran.” The article in question focuses on the NSA’s overseas intelligence gathering. Here is what it says about Iran:

In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.”

The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Britain intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf.

After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.”

This revelation, at face, does not seem to present a disruption to U.S. intelligence activities in Iran.

Kaplan concludes that these operations revealed by Snowden “have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with ‘whistle-blowing.’” But that’s only true if you ignore the rest of the articles from which Kaplan has cherry-picked his examples—articles that have informed people of programs (of questionable morality and legality) that they had no prior knowledge of.

Nesting links together as Kaplan does is a clever strategy that relies on the laziness of his readers. The meat of his argument is outsourced elsewhere, while still seeming substantial enough to form a foundation on which the rest of his speculative article can rest. For readers who take the time to click through, the harm done by Edward Snowden’s actions becomes as hard to pin down as before.


Jonah Bromwich is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Village Voice.


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